exploring the boundaries of leisure and crime

Publications

Key books or book chapters authored by members of the Deviant Leisure Group

This book represents the first attempt to step inside the holiday experience of young British tourists in San Antonio, Ibiza. Briggs’ ethnographic study reveals the ugly truth about how and why they get involved in deviance and risk-taking when they go abroad, driven by self validation and a commodified social context.

“For forty years far too much sociology has celebrated consumer culture. This is contemporary ethnography of the highest standard. Daniel Briggs uses his considerable skills to reveal in stark clarity the ‘dark side’ of the holiday experience. Contributing to a gathering new wave of critical thought, this type of daring and honest study will once again make sociology real and politically inspiring.” – Steve Hall, Teeside University, UK

This book provides a timely criminological investigation into the rapidly growing sale of fake medicines online. Some estimates suggest that the fake medicine trade has now overtaken marijuana and prostitution as the world’s largest market for criminal traffickers. This increase has been particularly apparent in the context of various evolutionary phases in information and communications technologies, and the Internet now acts as the main avenue through which this criminal market is expanding. Thus far – despite growing concern and media attention – this extensive, extremely profitable, and ultimately life-threatening online market is yet to be fully explored. Drawing on the authors’ own criminological investigation of both the supply and demand sides in the United Kingdom, this study offers the first in-depth and empirically-grounded analysis of the online trade in illicit medicines. Founded on rigorous research, and bolstering a rich area for debate, this book will be of particular interest for scholars of criminology and technology studies.

As the youth gang phenomenon becomes an important and sensitive public issue, communities from Los Angeles to Rio, Cape Town to London are facing the reality of what such violent groups mean for their children and young people. Complex dangers and instabilities, as well as high levels of public fear and anger, fuel an amplification of anxious public and political rhetoric in relation to gangs, in which the stereotype of the American street-gang – a ruthless, hierarchical, street-based criminal organisation capable of corrupting youth and fracturing communities – looms large.

Set against this backdrop, Urban Legends: Gang Identity in the Post-Industrial City tells a unique and powerful story of young people, gang identity, and social change in post-industrial Glasgow, challenging the perceptions of gangs as a novel, universal, or pathological phenomenon. Though territorial gangs have been reported in Glasgow for over a century, with striking continuities over this time, there are similarities with street-based groups elsewhere. Using this similarity as the foundation, the book goes on to argue that Glaswegian gangs have a specific historical trajectory that is particular to the city. Drawing on four years of varied ethnographic fieldwork in Langview, a deindustrialised working-class community, the book spotlights the everyday experiences and understandings of gangs for young people growing up in the area, reasoning that – for some – gang identification represents a root of identity and a route to masculinity, in a post-industrial city that has little space for them.

Readership: Students and scholars of criminology, sociology, public policy, and criminal justice, as well as police practitioners and policy makers.

This new book from Steve Redhead looks like a valuable addition to the way in which we need to be thinking about leisure and deviance.

To keep you going until its publication, you can listen to Steve in conversation about the book with Tara Brabazon here.

In Football and Accelerated Culture, Steve Redhead offers a new and challenging theorisation of global football culture, exploring the relationship between sport and culture in a rapidly shifting world. Incorporating cutting-edge concepts, from accelerated culture and claustropolitanism to non-postmodernity, he reflects on the demise of working class football cultures and the rapid media globalisation of ‘the people’s game’.

Drawing on international empirical research and a unique and ground-breaking study of football hooligan memoirs, the book delves into a wide array of disciplines, examining fascinating topics such as the relationship between music and football; hooligans and ultras; the rise of social media and anti-modern football movements; and ultra-realist criminology.

Football and Accelerated Culture offers a new way of thinking about sporting cultures that expands the boundaries of physical cultural studies. As such, it is important reading for anybody with an interest in the culture of sport and leisure, social theory, communication studies, criminology or socio-legal studies.

On the public roads boy racers are a foreboding presence, viewed with suspicion and derision by the ‘respectable’ motorist. The problem of the young (male) driver is one which has plagued authorities and governments due to youths’ acclaimed propensity to engage in deviant and dangerous driving behaviours.

Boy Racer Culture sheds light on the boy racer phenomenon through ethnographic research with the notorious ‘Bouley Basher’ culture in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland, and the moral panic on the part of outside groups including the local community, police, politicians and media. This book examines the creation of masculine and feminine identities in a traditionally male-dominated subculture through car-related rituals such as ‘modding’, subcultural media and events, and the quest for celebrity status via public performances.

Boy Racer Culture challenges common misconceptions surrounding the boy racer, the ‘problematic’ young (male) motorist and the car modifier. It will be essential reading for an international audience including sociologists and criminologists, particularly those with an interest in youth culture, subcultures, moral panics, car culture, anti-social behaviour, and the governance and policing of the roads.

Contemporary Perspectives in Leisure uses a variety of disciplinary approaches to introduce the most important trends in contemporary leisure in the Twenty-First Century. With contributions from some of the leading international figures in modern leisure studies, the book examines key philosophical and theoretical debates around leisure, with reference to concepts such as happiness, enjoyment and quality of life, as well as the most interesting contemporary themes in leisure studies, from youth leisure and ‘dark’ leisure to technology and adventure.

Why do our night-time cities seem to mix pleasure with violence? This is the time and place when cities are taken over by young men in search of alcohol, drugs, another club or a fight. Current public policy has patently failed to keep on top of the new trends in both consumption and destruction which make urban centres simultaneously seductive and dangerous. Violent Night uses powerful insider accounts to uncover the underlying causes and meanings of violence. Interviews with the police, the perpetrators and the victims of violence reveal the complex emotions that surround both the perpetration and resolution of crime. Violent Night shows that a new approach is needed to successfully rehabilitate a culture struggling and failing to deal with nihilism and escalating hostility.

Written by field-leading experts from across the globe and designed for those who want a clear and exciting introduction to the complex areas of crime and deviance, this book provides a large number of short overviews of a wide range of social problems, harms and criminal acts. Offering a series of cutting-edge and critical treatments of issues such as war and murder, paedophilia, ecocide, human experimentation, stalking and sexting, this book also gives a guide to further readings and suggestions for other media to develop the reader’s understanding of these issues.

Unpicking the lives of dedicated drinkers, hedonists and adult consumers, Contemporary Adulthood and the Night-Time Economy examines the emergence of new forms of cultural and aesthetic attachment to alcohol and reconsiders the way we think about and use our city centres. The first generation to experience the new experiential markets of the night-time economy are now in their thirties and forties, but have been largely neglected in research on alcohol consumption and night-time leisure practices. While the general assumption appears to be that such individuals simply grow up and grow out of excessive alcohol consumption and adopt the identity of a respectable adult, Contemporary Adulthood and the Night-Time Economy highlights how the late night city centre continues to act as a significant draw and as a means of examining the relationship between consumer capitalism and the erosion of traditional adult identity. For committed consumers the night-time economy represents part of a powerful trend that is destabilising identity, cultivating narcissism and infantilising a generation.

Focusing on a number of contemporary research themes and placing them within the context of palpable changes that have occurred within football in recent years, this timely collection brings together essays about football, crime and fan behaviour from leading experts in the fields of criminology, law, sociology, psychology and cultural studies.

Examining issues such as the links between football supporter sub-cultures and hate crime, football and corruption, football as a crime generator and the policing of crowds, this volume moves forward the debate on football hooliganism, situating the study of football and crime into appropriate historical, theoretical and policy contexts. This valuable collection illustrates that the analysis of football and fan behaviours still has much to offer the criminological community.

Over the last decade, the concept of dark tourism has attracted growing academic interest and media attention. Nevertheless, perspectives on and understanding of dark tourism remain varied and theoretically fragile whilst, to date, no single book has attempted to draw together the conceptual themes and debates surrounding dark tourism, to explore it within wider disciplinary contexts and to establish a more informed relationship between the theory and practice of dark tourism. This book meets the undoubted need for such a volume by providing a contemporary and comprehensive analysis of dark tourism.

Criminology is at a crossroads. In the last two decades it has largely failed to produce the kind of new intellectual frameworks and empirical data that might help us to explain the high levels of crime and interpersonal violence that beset inner city areas and corrode community life. Similarly, it has failed to adequately explain forms of antisocial behaviour that are just as much a part of life in corporate boardrooms as they are in the ghettos of north America and the sink estates of Britain. Criminology needs to rethink the problem of crime and re-engage its audience with strident theoretical analysis and powerful empirical data.

In New Directions in Crime and Deviancy some of the world’s most talented and polemical critical criminologists come together to offer new ideas and new avenues for analysis. The book contains chapters that address a broad range of issues central to 21st century critical criminology: ecological issues and the new green criminology; the broad impact of neoliberalism upon our cultural and economic life; recent signs of political resistance and opposition; systemic and interpersonal forms of violence; growing fear and enmity in cities; the backlash against the women’s movement; the subjective pathology of the serial killer; computer hacking and so on.

Based on key papers presented at the historic York Deviancy Conferences, this cutting-edge volume also contains important critical essays that address criminological research methods and the production of criminological knowledge. It is key reading material for those with an academic interest in critical, cultural and theoretical criminology, and crime and deviance more generally.

Party school: Crime, Campus and Community examines alcohol-related crime and “nuisance” behaviors prevalent at large public universities. Based on survey data collected in Spring 2009 and 2011 at a sports-oriented “party school,” the book examines the culture of student (mis)conduct, with an emphasis on analyzing the negative impact of excessive partying on crime victimization and quality of life in the college community.

Why do our night-time cities seem to mix pleasure with violence? This is the time and place when cities are taken over by young men in search of alcohol, drugs, another club or a fight. Current public policy has patently failed to keep on top of the new trends in both consumption and destruction which make urban centres simultaneously seductive and dangerous. Violent Night uses powerful insider accounts to uncover the underlying causes and meanings of violence. Interviews with the police, the perpetrators and the victims of violence reveal the complex emotions that surround both the perpetration and resolution of crime. Violent Night shows that a new approach is needed to successfully rehabilitate a culture struggling and failing to deal with nihilism and escalating hostility. – See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/violent-night-9781845201647/#sthash.muZhvgAM.dpuf